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Episode 352: 'The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca'
00:37:20
John J. Miller is joined by Dennis Blanton of James Madison University to discuss 'The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca.'
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Dennis Blanton
Foreign.
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John J. Miller
Welcome to the Great Books Podcast. Today we'll talk about the narrative of Cabeza de Vaca. I'm your host John J. Miller of National Review and listening to a production of National Review. Our guest is Dennis Blanton, an archaeologist and a professor of anthropology at James Madison University in Virginia. He he's the author of Conquistador's Tracking the Legacy of Hernando de Soto in the Indigenous Southeast, the editor and author of many academic articles and books. He's the two time president of the Society for Georgia Archeology. He joins us by Zoom as we record from Hillsdale College's campus radio station WRFH in Michigan. Dennis, welcome to the Great Books Podcast.
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Dennis Blanton
Thank you, John. It's a pleasure to be with you.
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John J. Miller
Why is the Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca a great book?
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Dennis Blanton
You know, there are many criteria, I'm sure, for designating a work a great book, but I have to say I'll start here by simply saying this is a great, great story, pure and simple. It's an epic tale of survival. Unlike a lot of the writings from this period, it's highly personal and it's an unvarnished portrayal of the events that Cabeza de Vaca was a part of. I'll say as well, the relation that Cabeza de Vaca gives us is important because it also provides us this critical perspective on a period of not only our nation's history, but world history that was pivotal still experience the legacy of this opening act of modern world history very much today. It also the events that he was a part of influenced the course of subsequent events in global history. It reminds us very importantly of the very long Spanish era in North America. It is a remarkable early ethnography, in essence, that's full of tremendous information about indigenous cultures in North America. And in many ways it's just a powerful commentary on us meaning human beings. And I would say it's a meditation on human behavior, says a lot about the human spirit and also human frailties. And for me as an archaeologist and for other archaeologists with more narrow interest, it provides insight into the kinds of things that we might expect to find.
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John J. Miller
We're going to talk about all of that, the adventure story behind the narrative of Cabeza de Vaca, as well as the early exploration of North America, the native cultures that lived here in the 1500s, the archeology behind it all, and more. Dennis let's start with the name of this guy. My high school Spanish is just barely good enough to recall that Cabeza de Vaca means head of the cow. What a name. What's going on here?
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Dennis Blanton
Well, I don't claim to know, and many people avoid that. But what we can say with some confidence, and it is an interesting name, no question about it, and your translation is correct, is that it's one that he has from by virtue of his mother's side of the family, who had the same names and same lineage. And it seems not to have been, you know, that remarkable or unusual or amusing, you know, in the day. But there is Cabeza de Vaca, head of the cow.
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John J. Miller
His full name is Alvar Nunez. Cabeza de Vaca. Everybody calls him Cabeza de Vaca. And in the spring of 1528, he found himself in Florida. How did he get there, and what was he trying to do?
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Dennis Blanton
Cabeza de Vaca was, by that point, in his 30s, was born, we think around 1490 or so. He eventually died in 1559. He was from Andalusia in southwestern Spain. He was born into this lineage, what we'll say lower nobility. So he was the term often used as hidalgo. He was a veteran. He had committed his life to service of the country. He had served internationally in Italy, for instance. He also helped put down an uprising in Spain. And so he was a committed soldier. He was a committed servant to Spain. And by virtue of this record, particularly as a military veteran, he earned an appointment on the Narvaez expedition of 1527, 28 is when it started, and his status there was treasurer and first lieutenant of the expedition. Narvaez is an interesting character. He was, at this point had been given a charter to what amounted to the southern part of North America, meaning from today's Florida far northward and far westward. It was poorly, poorly defined, but suffice it to say, it was a vast area. And so Narvaez set out in 1527, first from Santo Domingo via Cuba, and then eventually to peninsular Florida with a large expedition consisting initially of 500, 600 people, plus requisite horses and things like that. And Cabeza de Vaca was along in this position that we mentioned.
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John J. Miller
Who was Narvaez?
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Dennis Blanton
Narvaez, I just want to say, is interesting because I see this expedition for him in some ways as a bit of an opportunity at redemption. He had had a challenging career. He was dispatched, for example, from Cuba, which was the regional capital in the Caribbean, to Corral Hernan Cortez, who had gone rogue a bit. But Cortez, of course, is the conquistador we know as the one who subdued the Aztecs. And what's now Mexico City became Vastly wealthy. But Narvaez, in his attempt to corral Cortez, was defeated in battle. There he was taken captive by Cortez and eventually released. So he went back in the sort of ignominious way to Cuba. And so this expedition to Florida was a way for him, I think, to regain his status.
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John J. Miller
When they landed in Florida, I think in the what, what today is the Tampa bay region in 1528, were they on an expedition of discovery? Were they looking for gold? Were they trying to spread the faith? What were these guys seeking to do?
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Dennis Blanton
Narvaez was leading a colonizing expedition and he was seeking to establish a permanent foothold or relatively permanent foothold in the southern part of North America. His, his stated destination, his aim was to get to the section of the Gulf of Mexico which would be correspond to today's north eastern Mexico in the vicinity of Tamaulipas. So by landing in Florida with this colonizing expedition, he was far, far, far off course. But I would say it began badly and it ended worse for this. And this was, this was the typical pattern. Just about all of the earliest colonizing expeditions ended very poorly.
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John J. Miller
So what went wrong? These guys, they land in Florida, they started meeting the natives.
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Dennis Blanton
Well, they did. And part of the issue was there was some native resistance from the get go. And I think what we have to remember here is that Narvaez and his large company were not the first. There have been people who had explored Florida, such as Juan Ponce de Leon and others, and in a way, they poisoned the atmosphere. I think the natives in that part of the world had already become very wary of these intruders. And so there was tension and suspicion from the star. And as Narvaez started to explore, they blundered themselves. There was like these numerous cultural missteps and insults to the natives. And so that set off the series, almost endless series of conflicts, with many cases involve violence between the two groups. But Narvaez's great mistake, many would argue, is that he divided his company and he took about 300 of his party on an inland trek, as you say, starting in the area of Tampa Bay, heading northward up peninsular Florida. The remainder of his company stayed with the ships. And the idea was to rendezvous at a safe port that they thought they were close to. They were badly mistaken about their sense of geography. And this is important for us as we realize that this part of the world was so, so poorly known that they suffered under all this imperfect knowledge. But he was told that the place to go in Florida was a native territory called Apalachee. And Appalachia corresponds with today's Tallahassee, Florida, essentially. And it was a place that subsequent explorers were also aiming to find. Appalachia became legendary because it was relatively prosperous as a native community. There was a powerful chief there. So the understanding was if there were riches to be had, and frankly, if there was food to be had, that was the place to get it. So they beat a path essentially up the Florida peninsula to Appalachia.
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John J. Miller
What do we learn about the native cultures in Florida from the account that Cabeza de Vaca left? We know about the expedition, a lot of it, because this guy wrote it down later, after going on an amazing adventure, which we'll get to in a moment. But what do we learn about North America, the southeastern United States, the people who live there, the wildlife and so forth? What do we learn from this account about that early period?
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Dennis Blanton
This is the great value, or certainly one of the great values of this work by Cabeza de Vaca is the insights it gives us into these cultures. So we're suddenly seeing, like, the closest thing we have to a Polaroid snapshot or a video of native cultures at the time of this initial European arrival. What we see, I think, first of all, is there was a tremendous diversity of cultures. And Cabeza de Vaca was struck by that. He commented on it over and over again. Every time he turned around, they were running into new customs, new forms of architecture, new ways of making a living. But in Florida, specifically, the Apalachee were representatives of a culture that we, as anthropologists and archaeologists call Mississippian. And these Mississippian cultures were, I think, arguably the pinnacle of cultural achievement in the southeastern United States. And so they were an impressive society. They were agriculturalists. They lived in a hierarchical society, meaning that there's very distinct sort of class system. Their leaders were very powerful, and the Europeans were impressed by that. Elsewhere, though, we see, particularly as they advanced along the Gulf coast heading westward, that other groups were living very, very differently. They were essentially leading this hand to mouth existence as foragers. So again, we see in the native world that range from great sophistication to very basic kind of existence. The natural world. I love it because Cabeza de Vaca is the first, for example, to describe creatures, you know, like the American possum and bison. And he tells us about pecans and all these things that are iconic in the wildlife and fauna, fauna and flora of North America.
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John J. Miller
It has apparently the first written down reference to the possum quote. We saw an animal that carries its young couch in its belly, unquote is a marsupial, of course, here in, in North America, that's the first written description of this creature. Dennis, you're an archaeologist, and to do archaeology, I mean, you imagine you often begin with written sources, texts, documents, like the Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca. Eventually you go out into the field, you go to places, you, you, you look for physical evidence of this journey, the people who are living there, and so forth. What does the archeology of the southeastern United States tell us about this expedition and the encounters that they had there with the native cultures?
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Dennis Blanton
As an archaeologist, the jumping off point for me and others are these written documents. They're precious records that give us a, I think, a very useful starting point point. However, they're woefully inadequate. The, the story's incomplete, so it's kind of like an outline usually of what happened. Cabeza de Vacas I would rate as one of the better ones, but nonetheless, it's where we start. But our goal as archaeologists is to try and fill in those gaps in these records. You know, our objective is to improve the story. And it, it's as simple as if we're going to study this, we're going to tell these stories, we need to get it right. And archaeology is helpful in doing that. Now, for me, I've gotten into this area of research starting nearly 20 years ago now, really by accident. I had no intention of walking into this crowded room of early Spanish exploration studies. It was in good hands, it certainly didn't need me, but I, I launched my own expedition in Georgia to find a Spanish mission. So the, the Spanish mission period is what followed after this period of exploration and early colonization. But in the process, I found evidence of an early expedition I believe to be Hernando de Soto. And I was struck right away about as I got into it is how little we actually know. I mean, how could a 600 person expedition leave so little in the way of tangible traces? And so ever since then, I've begun to explore this, to seek out this kinds of evidence. And I have to say we've had great success and I have enjoyed success from many of my colleagues who are also pursuing the same sort of thing. So I think the key thing is that right now this is very much a work in, in progress, but we are taking steps and enjoying some success in this, in this area. The, the thing that we're learning is that it's a tremendous mistake to oversimplify is that, you know, it was, it was simply an expedition. And every day in that expedition was the same. We're seeing, say, in the case of Hernando Soto's expedition, that over the course of these four years that he was traipsing across the southeast United States, they were constantly shifting their calculus about how to adapt, how to deal with the Indians. And so every day was contingent on new conditions, which was defined by differences in cultures, differences in geography. And so we're beginning to tell a much, much richer story about these expeditions than we ever could before. But it's a challenge. I mean, you talk about the proverbial needle in a haystack. Finding this evidence is not easy. But when we do get it, we're learning a great deal.
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John J. Miller
How much do we really know about the routes they took, the places they slept? You know, Cabeza de Vaca slept here, that kind of thing. And I should point out you've already mentioned Ponce de Leon, who came to Florida in 1513 looking for the Fountain of Youth, according to the legend, which probably isn't quite true. Later we get to Hernando de Soto, whose journey is in the 1530s and 1540s. Cabeza de vaca. Vaca is between them. And all of this is long before Jamestown, which is 1607, Plymouth Rock, 1620, almost a century in the future. But do we know things like Cabeza de Vaca slept here at that level of detail?
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Dennis Blanton
We do not. There's been very little substantiated archaeological evidence of the Narvaez expedition period, much less Cabeza de Vaca's travels through Texas, his sojourn on the the coast of Texas and elsewhere. Part of it is simply a critical mass, and you could imagine by the time Narvaez, numbers had dwindled down to, you know, a dozen and then ultimately to four. They're not going to leave much of a trace. A lot of their belongings had been lost. They were often not in a place for very long and constantly shifting their residence. And so it doesn't leave much for archaeologists to find. Now, Hernando de Soto is a different story. They were very purposeful, very strategic about the way they had done it. You have to remember that de Soto, his own story is remarkable, had been with the Pizarros and the conquest of the Inca in South America. He learned a great deal there. One of those things was connecting the Indian dots to acquire food and also to pause frequently, particularly in the wintertime. So in the case of DeSoto, we have these long term encampments, which are sometimes months long, which did leave an indelible mark on the landscape. So these Expeditions can be very different and leave very different kinds of evidence. And that's something, of course, that we find interesting. I think it's very telling about these. These events. The interesting anecdote is that the survivors, the very few survivors of the Narvaez expedition were in great demand by people like Coronado, who explored the Southwest at Exactly the time DeSoto was exploring the Southeast. So De Soto and Coronado tried to recruit survivors of the Narvaez expedition as. As guides. In other words, they had gathered a certain kind of intelligence that would have been invaluable to these. These later expeditions. One of the survivors, as it happened, of the Narvaez expedition was successfully recruited. He was a black African slave named Estebanico. He survived this ordeal along with Cabeza de Vaca. But once back in Mexico, he agreed to accompany one of the sort of probing early expeditions northward into North America, where, regrettably, he lost his life in an Indian attack. But the story of these survivors is quite some.
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John J. Miller
We need to turn to this survival story aspect to their narrative of Cabeza de Vaca. Because the story begins with this big expedition. We get this ethnography of Florida. We get an account of what Florida's natural world was like back in those days. But this expedition goes poorly. There are a lot of bad encounters and so on, and these hundreds of men are eventually reduced to just a few. Dennis, take us through that story. Dennis, what happens to this expedition? How does it winnow down to four people with Cabeza de Vaco and Estevanico, two of them?
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Dennis Blanton
The reception that Narvaez received at Appalachia was. Was. Was not a positive one. The Apalachia resisted. The. The Narvaez party was essentially under siege the entire time. And they recognized, you know what? We've got to get out of here. In the meantime, smaller groups were dispatched by Narvaez down to the coast because Appalachia was located somewhat inland. And the idea was to try and find those ships, right, that they were supposed to meet. Well, those ships had searched for them, never saw them, and so left. Narvaez was essentially stranded. They decided that, you know what? We need to get to the coast and design some sort of escape route. How are we going to get out of here? The idea, strangely enough, was, you know what? We're going to build boats. And what was strange about it is that none of them had any experience as boat builders. It's one of the most remarkable stories of the entire epic is that they made their way to the coast and they said, okay, let's Build some boats. And then they looked at each other and said, how are we going to do that? And there was no one there with experience as a boat builder. The long story short is that they took their metal belongings, stirrups, weapons, and so forth. They built a forge. They melted all those things down and converted them into hardware that they could use for building these rafts. They also killed their horses that had survived, use them for various parts, including ropes, etc. These rafts they put together over a period of many weeks. And at the end of it, sure enough, they constructed five rafts. Those rafts, we think, were maybe between 30, 40ft long. They launched those five rafts, each of which was packed to the gill with from 48 to 49 of the survivors. So by that point, the original 300 that had struck out from Tampa Bay Overland had dwindled to somewhere between 240, 200.
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John J. Miller
Then they set off on rafts into the Gulf of Mexico.
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Dennis Blanton
The rafts immediately were not performing well. There was very little clearance above water, maybe to the tune of 6 inches. They were leaky, creaky, and not seaworthy at all. And very quickly, in stormy weather, these rafts started to come apart. They were blown off course. The rafts became separated. Occasionally they would land. They were under Indian attack. Narvaez was wounded by a rock to the face. So think it was a grim, grim spirit.
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John J. Miller
So they launch in Florida. They start to move around the Gulf Coast, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Texas. They eventually find themselves in or near what today is Galveston, Texas. What happens there?
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Dennis Blanton
By the time they got to, they crossed the outflow of the Mississippi river, made their way eventually to the area of Galveston, Texas, and they're landed. The rats have become separated. By that point, there were not more than about 80 left. Over time, that dwindled down to 12 and then eventually to 4. But in the area of Texas, they made landfall and tried to essentially survive. So it's a remarkable survival story. Those survivors, for the most part, were enslaved by local Native Americans. They led a brutal existence. They were forced labor, essentially. They were put to task of digging these roots, a staple crop, a plant of the natives there, and various other kinds of hard work. Many became sick, became ill. Some tried to make their way southwards where they thought they would find other Spaniards. And so eventually we're left with four. I will say one of the interesting challenges of making their their way on this, in this sort of coastal area of Texas, is that most of these survivors didn't swim. And so the rivers and the inlets posed a huge challenge, and they became somewhat paralyzed by the fact that they were not good swimmers and in some cases were refusing to move and were just fatalistic about the. The entire outcome. But Cabeza de Vaca is a remarkable individual, I think. Very smart, very shrewd. And so he decided he was going to escape his captors and head inland the short distance, which he did. There, he enjoyed this great freedom and success, at least relatively speaking, as a, what he called a merchant or a trader. So for about four years, he enjoyed this life of moving from the coast to the interior. At the coast, he would collect, essentially, shells, carry them inland where they were highly valued. Inland, he would exchange those for things like bison robes and a red pigment, which at the coast was highly valued. And so he was highly adaptable.
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John J. Miller
So, Dennis, what happens next? Because they spend a few years in captivity, it's a kind of captivity narrative. Cabeza de Vaca is acting a little bit like an entreprene and so forth. But eventually, these guys, these remaining four, they do something amazing that they do.
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Dennis Blanton
They endured this very, very difficult existence on the Texas coast, northern Mexican coast, for about six and a half years. Six and a half years. Every step of the way they were. They had designs to escape and free. But it one occasion after another, those plans were foiled. And eventually, though, they did escape and decided to head westward over land, aiming for the Pacific, which was what they referred to as the South Sea. By then, it become legendary. Of course, Balboa had discovered the South Sea. Cortez had even written about the South Sea. They were aware of it in this crude sort of geographical way, but they set their sights on it and struck out from the coast of northern Mexico all the way across to the Pacific Ocean. And they made it over the course of about nine months was this overland travel there. They. The stories just become even more sensational. They. They survived by their wits. And one of the things they. They recognized that they could do was function as healers, as physicians, you might say. The Indians gave them great respect and great authority for this. This reputation they gained as remarkable healers. And so everywhere they went, the Indians were inviting them in to take care of the sick and the infirm. And of course, in just about every case which seems apocryphal, there was these remarkable, you know, recoveries, you know, from all kinds of ailments, including one person who was. Was believed to be dead. But that gained them this great stature and a lot of authority to the point. By the time they were about midway on this trek from the Texas coast to the Pacific. They were commanding the natives. They were. They were get. Using them as scouts. They were getting all the food they wanted and so on and so forth forth. So that's I think. And along the way, of course, they were describing these tremendously diverse Native American communities that they met.
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John J. Miller
They made their way to the Pacific coast. What did they see along the way?
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Dennis Blanton
They begun to see signs of what they call Christians. There was a very sharp distinction that just about all of these Spaniards made on all these expeditions between Christians and non Christians. And the Christians of course, were other Spaniards. They started to see signs in the form of hoof prints. They started to see small camps where Spaniards Spanish parties had. Had spent the night. And then they started to see around the necks of some Indians in those areas, European items such as horseshoe nails and other things that the Indians had acquired from the Spanish and were wearing as amulets and so forth. And so that gave them the sign that we've got to be close. It was pretty soon after that that they did make contact with a small party of Spanish soldiers. And that event is remarkable in itself because there was astonishment on both sides, but particularly on the part of those Spanish soldiers, because Cabeza de Vaca and the three other survivors essentially came stumbling out of the wilderness in the company of many, many Indians. And they were dressed as natives. They were be draggled. They were completely unexpected. And so at that moment nothing was said. You can almost see it as the mouths of these Spanish soldiers were just agape and they were in awe of what they were looking at and they couldn't make sense of it. But eventually they did. They were persuaded that, you know what? No, we're not natives. We're not something else. We're you, we're Spanish. Please take us with you to the nearest settlement. Which they did. There they were reunited with other Spaniards. But this was, you know, after eight years, eight years in what they would call the wilderness.
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John J. Miller
Cabeza de Vaca then returned to Spain and he wrote his narrative in 1542. Dennis, an edition or a translation of this narrative that you recommend?
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Dennis Blanton
There is the one that I recommend. Simply titled the Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca. It's edited with a wonderful four word introduction by Rollina Ordorno and Patrick Charles Pouts. It's published by University of Nebraska Press and that was in 2003. There are others. One of the first sort of the classic was a translation by Thomas Buckingham smith in the mid 19th century. For those serious about the study of this I recommend it as well. And then, just for entertainment value, I would point out to your listeners that there's a film that was made in 1991 by a Mexican producer named Nicholas Echevarria. There have been many people who've been fascinated by this story, have written about it, and then tried to convey it in different ways.
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John J. Miller
Dennis, one final question. What can readers today get out of this old work? It's a great story. It's irresistible in a lot of ways. But are there any lessons for us now in the 2020s about this expedition, this narrative and so forth?
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Dennis Blanton
I think there's no, no question about it. You know, at one level, as I mentioned at the outset, it, it really is in, in some ways a study in the complexity of, of human relations and these enduring challenges that we still confront today when alien cultures interact. And so this is, this is an aspect of our existence that's still with us. And I think we can learn in some way from what this story by Cabeza de Vaca tells us. It also, I think, again, opens our eyes to the complexity of this early period of modern world history, really, the European, European expansion into the so called New World. What we see immediately through these kinds of works is it was a very, very messy story. It was a sort of lurching kind of process of colonization. The knowledge that people had was imperfect. There were competing interests and so forth. I would, of course, also for me, these are essential starting points for archaeological research. I would hope that our readers take the time to explore this, this open chapter, because it really was pivotal and much of what followed was, is influenced by what happened at this time.
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John J. Miller
Dennis Blanton, thanks so much for joining us and telling us all about the narrative of Cabeza de Vaca.
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Dennis Blanton
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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John J. Miller
You've just listened to the Great Books Podcast, a production of National Review. Please subscribe to the Great Books Podcast reviews of the show that helps us keep this podcast going. Send me your ideas for future episodes. You can reach me through my website@heymiller.com on Twitter. My handle is at hey Miller. And last of all, special thanks to all of you for listening. We'll be back next week. The episode of the Great Books Podcast.